An Ecology of Selves

What fungi, gender, and a runaway hotline taught me about becoming

I wrote in my essay collection about my childhood experience of being mistaken for a boy on a playground, in a game of keepaway — girls against boys, a border drawn in dust and rule and breath. I wrote, too, about the summer afternoons when I rode my bike with my brother and his friends, how they peeled off their shirts and I did the same, tucking mine into my back pocket so it fluttered behind me like a cape. I remember the feeling not as rebellion but as expansion: the body as possibility, as something not yet named. In those moments, I wasn’t deciding to deceive anyone. I was simply stepping into a current that carried me, and because it felt like power—like velocity, like sky — I didn’t correct the record.

What I haven’t written about are the times I chose the current deliberately. The times I became a boy on purpose.

Maybe it began in absence. My older sister’s near-fatal car accident cleaved the world into before and after. After, she remained, but altered—her body present, her mind refracted. The house reorganized itself around her needs, as it had to. Attention became triage. Love became logistics. And I, the youngest of five, learned the quiet mathematics of disappearance.

At night, unable to sleep, I leafed through the yellow pages until I found an ad for something called The Runaway Hotline. I had run away once already — packed a small bag, disappeared into the woods near that same playground where I had once been mistaken for a boy. I stayed there all day, rehearsing my absence, imagining its echo. At dusk I returned to the playground and sat at the top of the slide, a small sentinel, certain that someone would come looking, that my disappearance would have weight. No one came. Darkness arrived instead, and with it the sounds of things that did not need me. I went home. Everyone was asleep.

So when I dialed the number, I understood something already: that being unseen could be practiced, but so could being invented.

When the woman answered, her voice was warm, alert, ready. I lowered my own voice, shaped it into something steadier, less tremulous. I told her my name was Mike. I told her I had run away from parents who drank, who used drugs, who did not care if I lived or died. I embroidered the story with a precision that now feels like prophecy — detail as a plea, fiction as a form of truth. I don’t remember what she said exactly, only the cadence of her concern, the way it held me. Care, even borrowed, even misdirected, is still care. It landed.

I called again the next night. And the next. Each time becoming Mike more easily, more fluently, as if he were not a fabrication but a key — one that opened a door that had always been closed to me.

I have wondered since about the choice of boyhood. Whether it was as simple as knowing boys won the games on the playground. Or more complicated: that boys were listened to differently, their pain read as urgent rather than excessive, their anger as signal rather than flaw. Or perhaps it was something quieter, more subterranean — the sense that to be a boy was to be legible in a way I was not, that my own need, as a girl, had already begun to feel like too much, like an imposition on a household already saturated with grief.

In the work of Akil Kumarasamy, identity is rarely singular, never stable. Her characters slip between selves, across geographies, through timelines that refuse to behave. There are doubles and echoes, versions of a life that coexist without resolving. Reading her, I feel a recognition that is less about content than structure: the refusal of a single, authoritative narrative. The acceptance that contradiction is not failure but form.

What if Mike was not a lie but a parallel? Not an escape from myself but an articulation of a self that required different conditions to be heard?

When Kumarasamy spoke of On the Origin of Sex by Lixing Sun, I thought of fungi—organisms with thousands of mating types, a proliferation so vast it renders the word “gender” almost metaphorical. Not two, not even many, but an excess that destabilizes the category itself. Slime molds with hundreds of compatibilities. Fish that change sex as they age, as their environments demand. Life, it turns out, is not invested in binaries. It is invested in continuation, in adaptation, in the constant reworking of form.

And then Botany of Empire by Banu Subramaniam — a reminder that even the language we use to describe life is not neutral. That the naming of parts, the assignment of roles—male, female, active, passive — has been shaped by histories of power, by empire, by the human need to make the world mirror our own hierarchies. The flower becomes a diagram of our assumptions. The natural world, a text we have edited heavily.

I think now about the ways I learned to edit myself. To revise my needs into something more acceptable, more receivable. To split into versions — girl, boy, self, absence — depending on what the moment required. Kumarasamy’s work does not resolve these splits; it lets them hum alongside one another, dissonant and true.

The part of me on the playground, waiting to be found. The part of me on the phone, inventing a boy who could be saved. The part of me that would later seek out care in the bodies of women, mistaking proximity for repair, drinking from their tenderness as if it could retroactively mother me. None of these selves were false. None were sufficient alone.

Kumarasamy writes toward the body as archive, as the site where all our contradictions are stored and metabolized. Her characters map the haunted architectures we build to contain what we cannot reconcile. Between them — in the quiet, fracturing expanses — I find permission to let the story remain plural.

Because the ending I once wanted — a clean emergence, a singular self, healed and whole — is not the ending that feels true. What feels true is this: I have learned to stay.

To sit, now, in the dark without converting myself into someone more deserving of light. To answer my own voice when it calls, in whatever register it arrives. To understand that the care I once outsourced, bartered for, performed into existence, is not something I have to earn through invention.

There are still many of me. The child on the slide. The boy on the phone. The woman writing this, who knows that solitude can be a balm and not a verdict. They do not cancel one another out. They do not resolve into a single shape.

They coexist, like those innumerable fungal forms—touching, exchanging, transforming—an ecology rather than a conclusion.

And for the first time, that feels like enough.